Sheetal Sharma’s Santacruz living room doubles as a home, archive and costume lab. Copper curios and family photographs share shelf space with hefty books on Chanel, Givenchy and Prada. His team gathers here to dissect scripts and build characters. At present, the room is occupied by a mythological drama set before the Ramayan.

“I don’t like working in production-house boardrooms. They feel very cubical,” says the 44-year-old, dressed in his own uniform of white linen shirt and olive-green trousers. “Here, there’s open space to think and bounce ideas around.”

There is a new object in the room too: the National Film Award he shares with Deepali Noor for the costumes of Pushpa 2 - The Rule. Sharma initially assumed the email announcing it was a scam. “With so many online scams around, I didn’t even open the link,” he laughs. A call from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting eventually convinced him otherwise. On September 22, he received the honour from President Droupadi Murmu in Gujarat.

Cinema was never the plan. Raised in a military family between Jammu, Amritsar, Pathankot and Mumbai, Sharma first enrolled in hotel management, “because I wanted to be a chef.” Dyslexia made the mathematical side difficult, and he left after 18 months.

An aptitude test guided him towards creative work. Graphic design proved too geometric; fashion finally stuck. At the Wigan and Leigh college of fashion and management in Mahalaxmi, he learnt to sketch, cut, stitch and embroider, before studying period costume for theatre in Britain. Then came the 2009 recession and a return to India without a job.

His real education began on Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely, where a tiny budget meant Sharma did almost everything himself. “I ironed garments, distressed fabrics and learnt to navigate Mumbai’s wholesale markets.”

He still does. Crawford Market, Mangaldas Market and Chor Bazaar are as useful to him as any fashion archive. For Pushpa 2, Rs 150 second-hand saris bought off the street were cut up and transformed into printed shirts for Allu Arjun and the supporting cast. Sixteen blue saris were used to a create look for Arjun in one dance sequence alone.

Sharma reads a script closely, and likes to pick apart every detail. He annotates it line by line, inventing histories that may never be spoken on screen: how long a character’s hair might be, whether they would have a tattoo, how much money they possess, what they would realistically buy.

Sometimes the clue comes from life. “Gangubai’s sunglasses in Gangubai Kathiawadi were inspired by women I spotted on Mumbai local trains, pairing saris with goggles. Her white wardrobe drew upon the scant historical description of Gangubai as a woman who wore white and plenty of gold. One sari I sourced was an 80-year-old piece from Jodhpur, woven with real silver thread.”

The clothes had to work with Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s sets and light too. Sharma recalls how, on Kesari Chapter 2, a miniature of the courtroom helped the departments decide whether charcoal coats would photograph better than black. In Imtiaz Ali’s Main Wapas Aunga, clothes became a direct narrative device for Ishar Singh Grewal, the elderly protagonist played by Naseeruddin Shah, who has Alzheimer’s disease. A traditional Chand Bali earring changed size between scenes, while one outfit shifted from white to red without changing its tailoring, signalling the character’s growing memory loss. His private costume archive in Govandi now holds pieces from several films, kept with the producers’ permission: Shah Rukh Khan’s black kurta-pyjama from Raees, jewellery made for Vicky Kaushal in Chhaava and other remnants of characters whose lives ended when the cameras stopped.

For Stree, a vintage shawl found in Chor Bazaar became Shraddha Kapoor’s maroon embroidered jacket. When costumes from the first film could not be traced, Sharma says, “My team recreated them for Stree 2, re-dyeing and reprinting fabrics and even recreating materials that were no longer available.”

That obsessive eye does not make Sharma particularly interested in fashion trends. He cheerfully admits that contemporary terminology can escape him and prefers the permanence of a trench coat or Patiala salwar to whatever happens to be fashionable that season.

It may explain why his work rarely feels like celebrity styling. On Animal, where he joined after four previous costume designers, Ranbir Kapoor ended up in the linen shirts Sharma himself favours. “On set I was told, ‘You made him like you,’” he recalls. Nor does he believe cinema must always dress people exactly as they dress in life.

“Films also need to sell aspirations,” he says. “We are city people, so we might say, ‘Who does stuff like that?’ But in small towns, people really adore those things. They aspire to go to college looking like that. In the end, films are selling dreams.”

His own taste remains considerably less grand. If he ever starts a clothing label, Sharma says, it will be “easy and breezy”, built around simplicity rather than trends. Which seems fitting.

After years of making clothes speak for everyone else, Sharma is happiest when his own clothes speak the least.